‘The Edge of Our Bodies'

Hybrids are interesting beasts, as much for what they are not as for what they are. Adam Rapp's “The Edge of Our Bodies,” which opened Thursday in the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, is not written like a traditional play but is presented as such — though, save for one walk-on character, there is only one actress on stage for the duration of the production.

And yet it's not simply a one-woman show.

“The Edge of Our Bodies” is an intriguing genre mix of drama and young-adult fiction that employs metafiction as a storytelling device spiced with a startling and effective intertextual element. In other words, we are not allowed to forget that our young heroine who narrates her own journey is telling us a story — a fiction of sorts.

A precocious yet vulnerable 16-year-old on the lam from her New England boarding school, Bernadette (Catherine Combs) takes the train into New York to visit her older boyfriend with some big news. On her Salinger-esque journey, she encounters a host of strange older men, well-intended and not, as her boyfriend dodges her calls and she inches closer to chaos.

Bernadette's short story — from which she begins reading before she abandons the manuscript and immerses herself in a theatrical re-enactment — is mannered in that arch and aloof way that actually sounds as if it was written by a very smart and very self-conscious 16-year-old. Playwright and director Rapp, also the author of acclaimed young-adult novels, is well-versed in the adolescent voice, capturing that desperate need for truth to be heard that is constantly at odds with a desire to show off all the tricks a smart kid can learn in Great Books class.

But story is what we come to the theater for, and story is what keeps Bernadette ensconced in the world of her own school play, caught on stage after the closing night of her performance in Jean Genet's “The Maids,” unable to face real life again.

In its most powerful moments, theater has that bewitching quality. The real trick is not to convince us that what we're seeing is real. The gift is to make us read the truth between the lines, and the beguiling Combs is thoroughly convincing as a teenage girl who, when she pens the short story based on her own experience, writes the character of Bernadette as a more knowing, more sophisticated version of her real self.

It is in those moments when Combs allows Bernadette's narrative mask to slip that we see that real girl, looking impossibly young smoking a cigarette and flirting with a middle-aged salesman over drinks and coming undone over pancakes with a girlfriend near the end of her story, an emotional unraveling that is not actually written into her own narrative. Those moments and others like them prove this story needs to leave the page and step into three-dimensional space.